The Most Common Tiny Mistakes Made When Setting Up a WordPress Site

I’ve just finished five years of teaching non-stop college and community education workshops and programs on WordPress for beginners, novices, experts, web designers, web developers, web programmers, and those who think they know everything but still realize they have a lot to learn. I love that last group as they are willing to learn and […]

How to Install, Configure, and Use WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins come in two styles: drop-in and mess with. Those are my terms, not the official ones. Drop in WordPress Plugins are Plugins you upload, activate, and then interact with only through the WordPress Administration Panels. Mess With WordPress Plugins are the ones you install and interact with through the Administration Panels, but they […]

Alex King: WordPress Themes Versus Templates

Alex King’s “WP Themes vs. Templates” discusses the modular system of how WordPress Themes work with some good tips on creating a template form to work within your WordPress Theme. While the theme system works well as advertised, it doesn’t work exactly the way I like to set up my web front-end code. Luckily, it […]

Secrets of WordPress Theming

For an amazing examination of building a WordPress Theme, dissecting every detail of the modular PHP building blocks and code that goes into a full, do-it-yourself WordPress Theme, check out the The Secrets of WordPress Theming by Chris J Davis from Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally. Begin at the beginning with some basic core tips and […]

A Guide to the WordPress Codex, The Online Manual for WordPress Users

WordPress is so easy, for the most part, you can use it right out of the box. Once you get familiar with the powerful features beyond the most simple post writing, creating Pages and categories, you will probably want to do more. The WordPress Codex is the online manual for WordPress users. It takes you […]

Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch

A lot of people are martyrs and want to get their hands in the dirt and design their own WordPress Theme from scratch. That’s okay. I did that, and then got smarter. Let’s start with the smarter choice. First, find a WordPress Theme architecture that you like, be it one or two sidebars, or no […]

What I Needed to Learn About WordPress

In the last post, I spoke about why I choose WordPress as my site’s CMS program. Along the way, I needed to learn about how WordPress worked as part of the preparation for installing and running WordPress on my main site. First was the issue of static HTML vs dynamic pages. Static vs Dynamic Pages […]

Announcement: Blogging Tips Book By Lorelle VanFossen

My new book, “Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”, is now available. This book began as a series of articles from this blog to be put into a hand-out for participants of the Successful and Outstanding Blogger Conference (SOBCon07) held last week. As we discussed the book, it was clear that we […]

When the Blog Breaks: Fixing Your Broken Blog

In Part One of this two part article series, we explored how to determine when your blog or website is down and explored various monitoring and notification methods. In this part, we will look at what may break a blog, and offer suggestions on troubleshooting and fixing your broken blog. What Can Bring Your Website […]

Another How To Website Design Tutorial

I’m always looking for examples of step-by-step instructions and resources to help you learn more about website and blog design and layout. Here’s another one. Design in Flight’s article, “Soup to Nuts Making a CSS Based Layout Start to Finish” tackles a standard HTML layout and how to develop it. WordPress users should look at […]